Bay of Souls

by Robert Stone

  "Looks like it was a busy shop," Michael said to his new friends.

  "In the old days it was," Roger declared. "Really was."

  Michael took one of the 80-cubic-foot cylinders and tried applying it directly to the compressor. He had only worked with portable machines before but the join seemed to work. He pumped the tank to something under 3,000 psi, screwed on the regulator and took a lungful. It seemed sweet enough. The taste of the air in the mouthpiece gave him a charge of anticipation, the thrill of game time. He tried the tank again.

  "It's a beautiful reef offshore," Roger said. "They call it Petite Afrique because of the shape." He formed the curves of Africa with his hands, swelling breast and scimitar horn. "Two miles out."

  "Is that where we're going?"

  "We're going farther. To the ledge."

  "How deep is the thing?"

  "We don't know." He turned to the Trinitejan. "Hippolyte thinks he knows where the plane went down. He says you can see it down there. From the surface you can kind of make it out."

  "Should be able to see the operating lights," Michael said with a shiver. "I presume the pilot's still down there?"

  No one answered him. The shop employed old-style French-made auxiliary tanks that could be fitted to the diver's main cylinder. They engaged with the shift of a J-valve and Michael disliked using them. When you ran low on air with one attached, the supply in your main tank simply stopped cold. If blind groping over your shoulder failed to locate the valve, you went airless, an absolute condition. Nevertheless, he fitted one on. Frightened, out of practice, he knew he would overbreathe, use up his air in little more than half an hour. He filled two other tanks; it was heavy work and he was sweating, exhausted. It was getting late and he had not had a proper sleep in a long time. A false dawn seemed to rise across the bay from the Morne.

  "The accident's been reported," Roger said. "Presumably the U.S. Coast Guard in the Mona Passage picked it up. Or the British in Grand Turk. But the Trinitejans have no helicopter operative we know about and they shouldn't have the location."

  "A lot of people could have seen him fall," Michael said.

  "That's right," Roger said. "That's why we have to move fast."

  Michael carried his gear and a wetsuit down to the hotel's dive boat. Hippolyte had to fill the boat's engine with fuel. He himself brought along a mask and snorkel.

  They got the tanks into the dive boat and poled the boat over the inshore reef. Even in darkness the bank of dead coral was visible below, a chalky mass catching the glow of the night sky. At the edge of the reef they shoved off into breaking surf. The seas were manageable, slowed by the outer barrier. Still they had to hold fast. The tanks, secured along the inboard rail, rattled together like conspirators.

  Beyond the break, Roger started up the engine, giving the boat enough throttle to hold its place. Michael sat in the small cabin, in a folding chair with his back to the bulkhead. Hippolyte was muttering little songs, jesting rhymes and ditties. He seemed anything but tense as he studied a chart in the rusty dream of his muffled flashlight. The boat was running without lights and Michael thought he had the sense of other unlit boats around them.

  "I've survived a couple of these," Roger told Michael. "Glad I didn't ride shotgun on this one."

  "Who was the pilot?" Michael asked.

  "Colombian," Roger said. "Lara rode down from Puerto Rico with him."

  "She did?" That might have been the first time he thought about her fine raptures over the diving. Why should she think it was an easy dive? Unless something was laid out there for him to retrieve. These things went down. He read the papers as much as anyone else. Actually he read them less. But sufficiently. In any case, he was going to do it. Hers in the ranks of death.

  While Roger read the island's offshore charts, Michael put on the lower part of his wetsuit over his shorts. They were large, top and bottom. He would have to be careful to get the air out of the suit before going down. Otherwise it might mean shooting to the surface on the way up, filling his lungs with his own death's blood.

  Hippolyte spoke up. "La lune! Regardez!"

  And there she was, a warp short of full, risen over the Morne. It lit up the bay far more effectively than the old town's unsteady municipal flickerings.

  "Take the glasses and have a look around," Roger told Michael. "See if we have any privacy."

  Michael scanned the horizon line. The binoculars were fancy strap-on navy night-vision items that turned the dark seascape into a digital optic entertainment. No vessels appeared, no one. Dead ahead, the edge of ocean was broken by two tangled shapes, mangrove cays whose leaves, weirdly tinted in the night glasses, shuddered on the wind.

  "Nothing."

  Roger and Hippolyte were talking earnestly in Creole, Hippolyte pointing from the cays to the hulk of the mountain.

  "He thinks if we follow the reef from Sauvequipeut toward Haut Morne we'll go over it."

  "How can he tell in the dark?" Michael asked.

  "There should be an oil slick when we get there. And it's not as dark to him as it is to you. He's a shrimper."

  "A shrimper?"

  "He knows the bottom very well. It's his house. He's counting off the little mangrove islands," Roger told Michael. He himself opened the throttle and they chugged along at a deliberate speed. After a few minutes Hippolyte asked for a cigarette. He took it and leaned forward to let Roger light it for him.

  "He figures distance by smokes," Roger told Michael.

  They followed the reef line, Hippolyte keeping the field glasses focused on the two mangrove cays across a spur of reef. In a while, he requested another cigarette. The swell increased. Finally he tossed the stub of his Marlboro overboard and said, "C'est là."

  "Oop!" Roger quickly came about.

  He held the bow to the wind with one arm. Hippolyte and Michael hurried to the port rail. Hippolyte leaned down with the viewing glass he used for spotting sponges, a four-sided wooden box with a window at the end. Roger peered into the box with the night glasses. He muttered something and passed them to Michael.

  They were over the wall. Using the binoculars and Hippolyte's contraption it was possible to see the higher ledges, patterns of elkhorn and tube coral descending into red and gray murk. A few gas cans and fan belts littered the highest shelf.

  "What's he seeing?" Michael asked.

  Hippolyte was looking across the reef toward the mountain range.

  "C'est là," he told them. "Voilà isir. Ici."

  They tried using the hand light in his viewing box but saw no more at first than the outline of their own anxious faces.

  Michael took the box and, with Roger and Hippolyte holding him, had a long look down the slope. After a minute or so he thought he saw a faint green glow. In a little time, the glow doubled. Trick of the eye? The points shifted, fluttered, blinked in his bleary vision, but they were light and they were constant. There was a little red light as well.

  "I think it might be an instrument panel. It's deep."

  "Well," Roger said after a moment, "let's get it, brother."

  They went below to a cramped cabin with a nonfunctioning compressor and some empty tank racks. Michael fixed a regulator to the tank and tested it.

  "So what's down there, Roger?"

  Roger had a photograph of an airplane. He showed it to Michael under a cabin light.

  "This is a Cessna 185. Two seats up front, a single seat behind it. Behind the single seat is a four-and-a-half-by-five storage compartment. It contains two watertight cases weighing about ten pounds each. Also a metal tube of drawings and paintings. Get the paintings if you can. But the two cases are the thing."

  "I thought it was always packaged to float?"

  "What can I say?" Roger asked him. "Rash optimism."

  Michael took his fins and went on deck. Roger came up behind him.

  "I don't know your temperament, Mike. You might find some upsetting things that you should just, ah, leave alone."

  "Lik
e what?"

  "Like the pilot."

  "Oh."

  "He was a very determined guy," Roger explained. "Nice fella."

  "You knew him?"

  "Oh," Roger said, "I knew them all to talk to. Some of them were charming."

  Just then, at the far end of the bay, a high-speed helicopter made the crossing from Point aux Riches to Mont Cesar. It moved in a circuit of whirling lights.

  "Shit," Michael said. The helicopter probably indicated the American presence in one of its aspects.

  Roger took him by the arm. "Wear your salutation. Wear it for Erzule. And for Lara." He tied the red band around Michael's forehead over the mask.

  Michael was looking at the helicopter.

  "Go, Michael," Roger said. "Never mind them. Go. Go." He put his palm against the red band. "Ave Maria Purísima. Go, for Christ's sake."

  Michael, to his own considerable surprise, made the sign of the cross and fell backward into the darkness.

  He had taken a hand light. For a while he treaded water, squeezing air from his oversized buoyancy compensator. Then he let himself slowly descend, sweeping the top of the wall with his light. There, it was eel grass and fans, litter, beer cans and wrenches, bristling with spiny urchins. There was a good deal of chalk, dead elkhorn. Hardly any fish, a few tangs. More or less what he had expected.

  The little fever, the sick sting of fear in the gullet he had been breathing through all day, eased a little as he went down. It helped, performing the nice necessities of diving, to become a different animal in a different element. The wonder of it appeased his imagination.

  He felt himself landing lightly on the next ledge; his fins touched, then his knees. He disengaged, turned over on his back and twisted upright. Brain coral here and a kerosene can. He checked his depth gauge. Eight meters, twenty-six feet.

  Crossing the ledge over the elkhorn, an admiring barracuda came to share the dive, then, quicker than the eye, a second appeared in the beam of his light. When he was on the wall, descending again, they followed him down in a slow spiral.

  Equalizing, he felt as though the pressure against his body were the weight of darkness itself. Dark possibility above and below, everywhere beyond the little circle of his light. But close at hand, the wall was richer than he had imagined. Colors came forward almost violently, flashed into life within the vagrant cordon he spread. Star coral hung on the underledges; there were caves where baby sponges grew on a gleaming black carpet, like anemones in a lava field. Black coral, something rare. Probing farther along, he saw that a lot of it had been chipped away; the claw of a lost hammer glinted among the fans.

  Attended by the 'cudas and a cautious trumpet fish, he moved out from the face and tried to accelerate a little, to lose more of the air in the big BC. He passed beautiful terraces of brain coral. When he had first seen brain, diving years before, it had stirred his faith, the form of it, suggesting in that deep liquid world the mind itself, the mind of things. A little savor of that time was with him when he came to the field of ruined coral. Below him was a trail of hacked and severed creatures, bare soiled sand and broken rock. His light struck a rainbow. Following it with his beam, he saw that the rainbow was rising in a broad column toward the surface. For some reason, the prismatic column was crowded with fish. There were more than he had seen so far: parrotfish, wrasse, tangs and, in great numbers, angelfish. For some reason the fish were circling, remaining within the colored circumference. He turned the beam down and saw that the numbers of fish increased with depth. Paddling away from the destroyed terrace, he followed the rainbow down.

  So many fish, he thought, lovely in their numbers. A cloud of angels—and on the edge of vision the trembling barracudas, waiting to pick off stragglers. Ten feet farther down the column and the track of destruction, his light fixed on the plane.

  Its serial number was stenciled in black on the blue-gray skin. Hoping to keep clear of debris, Michael moved away from the face of the wall and descended from open water. The beam of his light was just large enough for him to get a working picture of the wreck. The plane was upside down at a forty-five-degree angle, nose foremost into the reef. The rainbow column rising from it was composed of the last dregs and fumes from its fuel tanks. Somehow they had failed to discover a slick on the surface. The cabin door on the side facing Michael was open, showing the empty passenger seat just inside. The seat next to the vacant one had something piled on it, something obscured by the swarms of fish of every shape and species that teemed in it. Through its open door the cabin looked like an aquarium tank—but not an aquarium, he thought, swimming over with the light. More like a fish market's display bin because of the sheer volume of the creatures. No responsible scientific or educational enterprise, no aquarium, would confine living creatures in such insufferable density. He closed on the upended aircraft and poked his light into the cabin.

  Of course the remains of the pilot were inside, and of course the fish were there in uncountable numbers to eat them. The remains were hugely swollen, stuffed into khaki cloth, and the head was so horrible that it frightened Michael into dropping his flashlight, leaving him traumatized in sudden darkness. He had to hurry down after the tumbling illumination while its beam careened over the coral wall, lighting crevices where half-coiled morays darted, lighting pillars of sea snow, the tiny flakes ceaselessly falling. A barracuda, drawn by the light's filament, made a lightning charge. He finally managed to get a grip on the handle about ten feet below the plane.

  He wrapped the light's strap around his wrist and began to explore the space behind the seats. His hands were trembling, his entire body was. He worked hard to avoid looking at the dead pilot; the corpse was a revelation, an undeniable demonstration of the ghastliness inherent in material existence. The swelling was unbelievable, the beard and hair grotesque, also the lipless teeth. The whole vocabulary of features made a distinctly different statement.

  Creatures had occupied the large storage space behind the seats and they fled his light in a scurry of fin and claw. He used his hands very tentatively, exploring the inside, hoping to keep his fingers intact. There had been dive mittens at the shop but he had chosen canvas gardening gloves instead. He had been down on enough wrecks to know that without a securing line he had better not venture too much of himself inside. Doors could shut forever. The aircraft's position was unstable; the whole thing could shift and plunge off the reef and into the Puerto Rico Trench. The trench began about three miles away, all of it dark and all of it down.

  He could see the two cases and a tubular package that might contain paintings. He leaned as far forward as he could to get a hold of one of the cases but the tanks on his back stiffened his reach. At last he caught a piece of one with the light. Just as he did, he felt the plane he was leaning on begin to shift. For a moment he thought he was imagining it. Then he pulled out, trying not to fuck it up in the rush, trying not to spring his own deathtrap. When he was out he thought again he had imagined it, the shifting. No way to be sure.

  Finally, swatting at shadows, feeling himself buried alive, half unconscious with fear, he got the tube. He held it for a moment between his legs and its weight bore him down; he had to inflate the BC slightly to hang on. Next he got one of the cases into the seat beside the pilot. The swarming fish made him shudder with loathing. With both cases and the big tube he began to consider how to get all three of the things to the surface. He was breathing hard; all at once it struck him that he had not once checked his pressure gauge. When he did, he saw the arrow trembling on the edge of the red zone. He had been overbreathing like a rookie. The sight of it put ice in his blood.

  Easy, easy, he said, speaking to the fish, to the pilot, his pal and fellow aquanaut. He gathered the cases and started up.

  He had ascended about ten feet by his wrist depth gauge when he began to feel the straps of his BC contract. Everything he wore, all the gear, weight belt, tanks, seemed to be squeezing him sick. Allowed a tiny window, a glimpse of calm, he tried to run t
hrough the diver's mental checklist. As the straps gripped him, he saw the BC ballooning. He had gone down with too much air in the thing and it had contracted under the water's pressure. Now as he rose it expanded, and as the binding cut into his flesh, his speed of ascent went out of control.

  Don't breathe! Don't breathe was the thing, the only thing, because a single intake of breath would do to his lungs what air was doing to the orange BC—puff them out like a kiddie's birthday party balloon until, like one of those merry little numbers, they popped, blood and tissue splattering his chest cavity. The higher he rose the more unbearably pressed the weight against his thumping, stifling heart, feeling like Cousin Clarence in the malmsey, the pain it was to drown, right, and the dreadful sights of water and the men that fishes gnawed upon. He tried exhaling the little swallow of soiled used air he was holding inside. The rule of ascent was follow your bubbles—no faster. Follow the bouncing ball. But the bubbles he could bring to the party were few and small, and he rose faster than they. The kids would be disappointed.

  Then the air in his tank ran out. He did not trouble to waste the priceless energy required to reach the J-valve. Moreover, he had no free hand. He was clutching the shit he had gathered in the plane like life itself. And of course there was no need for air—au contraire.

  The surface faintly lit with lovely moonlight was up there, a dream, a distant notion. But now he was in the real world, the water one, and he was drowning like all the others. One with the million million water bozos, blue bathing beauties, Phoenician sailors and narcotrafficking pilotos, all the other airless losers beneath the undulating sparkle of the briny deep. Fear illuminated him, lit him up. The loss of heaven and the pains of hell. The crushing pain, unbearable, the bindings slicing off his arms and legs. In his personal eternity he waited, waited for air, and he was dead, for it was not forthcoming. He dropped one of the cases and saw it spin down out of sight.